Archive of Mike Davis

Following Bernie Sander's unsuccessful campaign for the Presidential nomination in 2016, the Democratic Party has once more become a site of struggle for socialists. Leading up to the November 6th midterms, could the Democratic Party, in fact, be the best vehicle for social change? In this essay, first published over 30 years ago, Mike Davis warns us about the pitfalls of electoralism, and the passive clientelism that tends to replace popular politics under the bureaucratic guidance of the Democratic Party.

In this excerpt from the epilogue to his landmark 1986 Prisoners of the American Dream, Mike Davis sketches the necessary conditions to build an independent left politics that has real and effective social anchorage in the United States.

In this excerpt from his classic City of Quartz, Mike Davis examines the home security arms race that erected gates, walls, and thousands of "Armed Response" lawn placards across suburban Los Angeles in the Reagan era.

Any concept which — like "exterminism" — collates all the "inertial," "irrational," "symmetrical" and institutionally "autonomous" aspects of the arms race into a single over-riding process will make it harder to understand the purposeful, strategic function of the current arms build-up within the larger context of the New Cold War.